Your Electronic Vote in the 2010 Election Has Just Been Bought

With its purchase of Diebold, Republican-connected ES&S Corporation will control 80 percent of the electronic voting hardware in the US. (Photo: an0nym0n0us / flickr)

Unless US Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in
2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation.
With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have
the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold,
whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.
(http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine)

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots,
with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close
to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold will still
control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the US Supreme
Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the
only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to
write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it's even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful
of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only
the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions
of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to
vote and who doesn't.

Let's do a quick review:

1) ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software
are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life
ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;

2) As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer
voting machines in the United States in 2010, what scant few so-called paper
trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic
vote theft;

3) The source code on all US touchscreen machines now used for the casting
and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate
the machines---including ES&S---are not required to share with the public
the details of how those machines actually work;

4) Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none
carry any real weight in the face of the public's inability to gain control
or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has
been upheld by the courts;

5) With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of
the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation
will have the power to alter virtually every election in the US with a few keystrokes.
Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012,
the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;

6) Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S
also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators used
in this country with which voters use pencils to fill in circles indicating
their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems
are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots
and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major
piece of the US vote count;

7) The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration
systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to
remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004
election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city
of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased "accidentally"
by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote
counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S
and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting
equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.

Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed,
Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida?s Republican
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens
from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority
of them were not. Computer software "disappeared" 16,000 votes from
Al Gore's column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W.
Bush?s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner.
The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme
Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore
was the rightful winner.

In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled
county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).

Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting.
The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated
by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Diebold was a major player
in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting
firms and their technicians in "recounting the vote" which confirmed
the Bush "victory," despite exit poll results and other evidence to
the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed
some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.

In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold's voting machine operation is merely
the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the
REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and
ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors
whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees
them.

Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted
paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election
by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the "retail" level is far more difficult
than stealing votes at the "wholesale" level with an electronic flip
of a switch.

As it's done in in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only
realistic means by which the US can establish a democratic system of ballot
casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks
and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and
vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on
election protection, available at http://freepress.org, where this article was
first published, and where Bob's FITRAKIS FILES are also available. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S
HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at http://harveywasserman.com.